Chapter 2 - The Letter from a Dead Woman
I tore the flap and pulled out three folded pages.
Thank you for raising my daughters. But now it's time for you to learn the truth.
If you're reading this, then the girls' father has found you, and he'll be at your door soon. I need you to read this all the way through and do exactly what I ask.
I lowered myself into a kitchen chair.
The letter was from Nora. My best friend. The mother of the four girls who had slept under my roof every night for the last decade.
But Nora had been dead for ten years. So how was she sending me flowers?
I kept reading.
Their father's name is Preston. He came from money — old money, the kind of family that cares more about how things look than how they are. He knew about the girls. He always knew. He just wouldn't claim them, because four little girls and a woman he never married didn't fit the picture he wanted for his life.
I pressed a hand over my mouth.
If he's turned up after all this time, be careful. Don't let a checkbook or a nice speech make you forget what he did to us. But here's the part I'm begging you to follow.
Give him a chance.
I had no idea then how much those three words would end up costing me.
I've spent years angry enough to choke on it. And still, some stubborn corner of me hopes he could turn into the father these girls deserve. If he asks to know them, don't shut the door on his account of me. Let them listen to him. Let them decide for themselves.
Just make sure they know the truth before they choose.
I saved everything. Every text, every letter, every note he ever sent back. It's in the storage bin behind the water heater, taped up under the bottom shelf. Proof of all of it — just in case.
I set the pages down in my lap.
After everything Preston had done, Nora was asking me to hand him the one thing he'd never once given her.
A chance.
Ten years I'd raised those girls by myself. Every man I dated found the door the second he learned there were four kids attached to me. My own parents told me I'd made my bed and refused to help me lie in it.
And now Nora was reaching out from ten years in the ground to tell me not to let my anger make the girls' decision for them.
"Mom?"
Claire stood in the doorway, grill tongs still in one hand.
I looked up and couldn't get a single word out.
"You're white as a sheet. What happened?"
May you like
Before I could answer, a car door thumped shut in the street.
"Somebody's here!" one of the younger girls shouted from the yard.
